We haven’t quite reached the endgame of the Marvel Cinematic Universe‘s Multiverse Saga just yet, but with confirmed release dates for both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, it’s certainly on the horizon.
Nevertheless, we’ve still got quite a few entries to work through before we’re greeted with the next Russo brothers one-two punch. Captain America: Brave New World and The Fantastic Four: First Steps are two, but Thunderbolts* offers up a very particular arena of interest given its antihero-centric narrative and the anticipated establishment of Avengers Tower as a power position for the treacherous Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Among that cast is Sebastian Stan‘s Bucky Barnes, who ranks among the most prominent Infinity Saga players still active in the current canon. As such, it will be no great surprise if he steps up as a driving force against Doctor Doom, a matchup that Stan himself has crossed his fingers for, per Screen Rant.
I hope I’m in a scene with him. Is there any other guy that could pull that off? I don’t know, probably not. After Tropic Thunder, is there anything that guy can’t do?
It makes sense for Stan, an MCU contemporary of Downey Jr.’s, to look forward to sharing a scene with an actor like him, but what might the implications of a Doctor Doom-Winter Soldier confrontation be in a diegetic sense? First, we need to consider if the heroes are going to notice that Doctor Doom looks a lot like their friend Iron Man ⏤ a beat that we of course have yet to see manifest in Doomsday, but one that we wouldn’t put beneath Marvel at this particular juncture. Deadpool & Wolverine threatened a future of referential sugar rushes and market-driven storytelling, after all.
But let’s assume they don’t do that. Let’s instead assume that the audience is trusted enough to interpret the meta-weight of such an encounter without any sort of camera wink. If so, what comics history could the MCU rejigger in hopes of setting that encounter up? The most obvious candidate is The Longest Winter, a comics arc that ran across five issues of Ed Brubaker’s 2012 Winter Soldier run, and also included Fear Itself #7.1: Captain America. In the arc, Bucky and Black Widow are tasked with eliminating sleeper agents that are trying to assassinate Victor von Doom, all in the hopes of preventing an all-out war with the Doom-led nation of Latveria.
As for how this could tie into Thunderbolts*, who’s to say that Doom isn’t one of the many high-profile figures that Valentina no doubt has on speed-dial as the director of the CIA? With the Thunderbolts’ history of shadow ops, who’s to say they weren’t recruited for a mission that involves Doom? Maybe someone wants the Thunderbolts dead because of the threat they pose to him.
Bucky’s role in the film also seems more ambiguous than we thought, given the closing moments of the trailer above. Might he switch gears if and when he discovers Doom’s involvement in the proceedings? Has he given us a valuable clue by hinting that a Bucky/Doom face-off would be fabulous, dahling? Whatever the case, we’re grasping at air with these theories for the time being and sadly have to wait until May 2, 2025 to see what the deal is with Thunderbolts*, asterisk and all.
Published: Oct 7, 2024 05:44 pm